perfidy

Since nobody gets my quantum cat box gay marriage riff, I'll explain something else.

Poor and middle class people in this country have been told that we need to give a large tax cut to the wealthiest 1% of people in this country. The reason, we are told, is that this will produce expansion in the economy. This, in turn, will create more jobs, raise the incomes of everyone, and just generally make everything turn out super.

Yesterday a one of my colleagues asked a question about taxes. We pulled out a spreadsheet and calculated roughly how much he's paid in social security taxes over his career of seven years (he's not yet thirty). We calculated that he has paid roughly $78,000 in social security taxes in that time. Seems like quite a lot, doesn't it? We are including, of course, both sides of the social security puzzle -- employer paid and employee paid taxes. If the employer was not paying these taxes, they could (and would) be given to the employee as wages.

At this point is is useful to note that the tax cuts for the wealthy are being financed by removing money from the social security surplus. Very large parts of my everyone's social security payments are diverted into the general fund. The general fund is operating at a huge deficit.

Is my colleague better off holding a promise to pay social security from the federal government, approximately valued at $0 and a promise by the GOP that the improving economy will help him out? Or would he be better off with his $78,000?

Any potential benefit to the poor and middle class derived from ephemeral supply-side effects is dwarfed by the tax theft this country is currently engaged in.

The social security taxes apply massive pressure against poor and middle class income mobility. Without being able to save this money and develop some capital of their own, they are forever trapped in a paycheck to paycheck existence, and forced to be wage earners.

When we give massive tax cuts to the wealthy, we do tremendous damage to the hopes and dreams of the other 99% of Americans, who can't save enough to make changes in their lives.

A corporation runs a pension plan for twenty years, and manages the assets in the trust fund. The workers have contributed 15% of their paychecks to this fund, on the understanding that it will be used for their retirements. The officers of the company "borrow" money from the trust and use it to finance general operations of the company and give themselves massive pay increases. They leave an IOU, signed and stamped and gold-starred.

In the private world, we would prosecute. We would call this theft. Or at least we would have, before the GOP congress of 1998 got its hands on the IRS, prevented them from investigating corporate fraud, and told them to go after earned income tax errors instead, so they can extract dozens of dollars from maids who make $6,000 a year.

A long time ago in a universe far, far away, a man named Erwin Schroedinger gave us the story of a cat. Schroedinger's Cat is a haunting tale of death and loss and, in particular, the nature of uncertainty. It's so sad, really. You see, there's this cat, who's alive and well. He's happy and well-fed. Life isn't too bad. Then he changes owners. The new owner is a bad man, and the bad man thinks he doesn't really need food, or water, or anything of the things that regular cats need to live and love and do more than survive.

The bad man puts the cat in a box. It's an iron box, heavy lid, no way to look inside. In fact, this box is never designed to be opened, ever...you can't see what's going on in there. Before the lid was shut, though, the bad man had a pang in his stomach. At first he thought it was a crappy egg, but it turned out to be his heart, maybe two sizes too small.

Still being a bad man, though, he gathered up another cat and threw it in the box with the first one, tightly shut the lid, and found the nasty pang departed. Then he welded the lid shut, put a padlock on it, wrapped the box in plastic, and bricked it into cubby hole behind a wall in his guest house, smoothing out the plaster in a pleasing manner. He centered a cross on the wall, and decided the cat's name was Fortunato. The other cat could be Fortunato 2.

After some time went by, Fortunato asked Fortunato 2 to marry him.

In a fit of macabre quantum pique, the immoral collapsing probability wavefront reached out into the universe and....

Did nothing, because nobody saw it; it never existed.

The Left's Anti-Semitic Chic?. Backed up by nothing in the article, of course. I wonder if Will actually wrote the headline. Onward:

Here the term intellectual is used loosely, to denote not only people who think about ideas -- about thinking -- but also people who think they do. The term anti-Semitism is used to denote people who dislike Jews. These people include those who say: We do not dislike Jews, we only dislike Zionists -- although to live in Israel is to endorse the Zionist enterprise, and all Jews are implicated, as sympathizers, in the crime that is Israel.

Today's release of Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ" has catalyzed fears of resurgent anti-Semitism. Some critics say the movie portrays the governor of Judea -- Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect responsible for the crucifixion -- as more benign and less in control than he actually was, and ascribes too much power and malignity to Jerusalem's Jewish elite.

A few things come to mind. First, anti-semites are people who dislike Jews for being Jews. And yes, small-minded one, you can dislike Zionists without being an anti-semite. Unless you believe that all Jews are Zionists, which they're not.

Will then raises Gibson's "The Passion". Why he provides this as bolstering material in an article accusing the entire left of being anti-semitic is beyond me. He might want to do a little exit polling at theaters, where he might rapidly discover that (shocker) religious Christian types are the main audience for this film. Say, which way do the religious Christian types in this country lean, anyway?

Oh...I forgot. It's a movie, which means it is inherently part of the left wing conspiracy.

Who inherits the FMA? The youth of this country. Overwhelmingly, younger citizens have indicated that they DO NOT CARE about sexual preference and gay marriage. What we have here is a last putrid outgassing from corpse of morality in this White House. The stench will linger over OUR generation, once these fools are gone.

The Rove Republicans will sell out the gay population and the youth of this country to retain power, by appealing to discrimination...by finding a way to redirect anger and frustration into an old, familiar pattern to blame and hatred...

Yes, it's time for reality vs. Bush, Episode MXVCVIIIMCII.

Speaking on his tax cuts for the top bracket, El Bush pontificates thusly (if mangled words can be considered such):

"If you're worried about job growth, it seems like it makes sense to give a little fuel to those who create jobs, the small-business sector," Bush told a gathering of the nation's governors at the White House. "So I'll vigorously defend the permanency of the tax cuts, not only for the sake of the economy, but for the sake of the entrepreneurial spirit."

Internal Revenue Service statistics cited by a Democratic senator this month show that the vast majority of small businesses do not earn nearly enough money to fall into the highest income tax bracket. According to IRS data from the 2001 tax year, 3.8 percent of the 18.2 million business tax returns filed that year reported taxable income of $200,000 or more. The top tax bracket last year kicked in at $311,950 of taxable income.

So -- yeah, the estate tax helps farmers, except nobody can identify a single farm that's been saved. And the top bracket tax cut helps small business, except according to the IRS data, it doesn't.

Exactly how much more of this bullshit are the reasonable people in this country going to put up with?

If the man's judgement is this badly impaired (either by lack of capacity or poor information delivery), why exactly do many "conservative" people in this country think he's so damn qualified to prosecute the war against terrorism?

Bush is a walking misjudgement.

Damn, that better be a word. It's frickin' late, I've just put in a 15 hour day, and I'm wiped. I get a free one here. Little blinky lights everywhere are telling me to pay attention to the outside world. Maybe they're floaty spots.

Oh yeah, almost forgot: Since the tax cut thing didn't work out and all it did was make a bunch of GOP political donors even more ridiculously wealthy, can we have the money back?

Right. And when we put the tax rates back after November, they'll bitch, bitch, bitch about the fact that the rich are being singled out for a tax hike.

The Post has given us an essential timeline on the Bush "tax cuts", the effects that were promised at the time, and what we've seen.

Bush and his "economic team" perform about as well as psychics at a county fair.

Before you raise the chorus of terrorism, war, and recession, keep in mind that these predictions were made after those things happened.

Here are some helpful mathematic elements for your consideration:

Today's debt as % of GDP : ~40%.
Historical high debt as % of GDP: ~50%.
Bush Debt as % of GDP: 6%/year.

Dick Cheney tells us that worldwide oil consumption is increasing at 3% a year, and reserves are decreasing by 2% a year. He should know.

Taxes lost to cheaters, every year: ~$300 Billion ($1000 for every man, woman and child in the country).

Odds of being audited if your income is less than 15k/year: 1 in 47.
Odds of being audited if your income is more than 100k/year: 1 in 66.

Amount stolen from working class people's social security fund to give tax cuts to the wealthiest, since 1983: $1.7 Trillion.

Ratio of Americans who pay more in social security taxes than they do in federal income taxes: 3/4.

Income rise in constant dollars since 1972, bottom 99%: 4%.
Income rise in constant dollars since 1972, top 1%: 500%.

Amount of income working class Americans can save, tax-free, per year: about $12,000.
Amount a public corporation officer can save, due to a loophole in the law: Unlimited, as deferred income.

Number of penalties assessed against American corporations for cheating on taxes in 1993: 2,400.
Number of penalties assessed against American corporations for cheating on taxes in 2002: 22.

Number of offshore credit cards issued to American citizens: somewhere between 1 and 2 million. Estimated tax cheating: around $70 Billion loss.

US trade deficit, 2003: $489 Billion.

Number of farms lost in the last 20 years to estate taxes: 0.

Purchase price of a data series from the IRS, so a concerned taxpayer can do his OWN analysis of the tax system: $3300, for one copied CD-ROM.

Donald Sensing has an interesting solution to the "marriage problem" that just might make everybody happy. Except for the radicals on both sides, of course.

It's just about 2:30 in the morning and I've just wrapped up another 16 hour work day. That's typical in the world of small companies, these days. Cash is hard to come by; I can tell you that my personal productivity factor is way up (rising productivity means GDP gains without additional employment).

Naturally I need to be pissed about politics before I go to sleep, so here's the thought of the night:

Lower tax rates are given to capital gains income because (supposedly) the money saved is re-invested into the economy, creating more jobs and more wealth. When we lower capital tax rates, we raise taxes elsewhere to compensate; these higher taxes are applied to the working class, which is pretty much everyone making under $250,000 or so.

We have seen a dramatic rise in direct investment; the GOP trumpet continuously about the ever-growing number of shareholders.

So if everyday folks are getting into the investment game, which should we be raising their taxes and handing that money to the very richest amongst us? If Joe Everyman is investing, like he apparently is, I really don't see why we don't just let him keep a little more of his money. He's going to invest it anyways, just like Thaddeus Q. Gatesfeller the IIIrd. And I'll tell you another thing: Joe Everyman isn't going to cheat on his taxes, or spend huge sums on legal fees just trying to avoid paying taxes.

Seems to me that the tax cuts for the rich come at additional cost to everyone else. And they aren't designed to increase investment; that would have happened anyway, with direct investing and 401k plans. Because he has to pay higher taxes to subsidize the truly wealthy, our Joe just doesn't have much of a chance of ever developing much wealth on his own. After all, his real income has only risen by 4% in constant dollars since 1972. Thaddeus has seen his wealth rise in that time frame by over 500%. Yes, that's five hundred percent. Trickle-down is working for someone...

So why are we screwing over the finances of this country and most people who live in it?

InstaPundit pre-interprets Kerry's 1971 testimony on the war; he listens to it so we don't have to!

Of course, maybe it's a good idea to just read the damn thing yourself, and form your own opinions. Note that Hewitt and Reynolds don't pull out any quotes or disagree with what Kerry said; they're crying little weasels because they don't like how he said it.

If someone can tell me who has more of a right to speak his mind about a conflict and the politics that drove it than a recently returned, wounded soldier, please speak up. If the GOP wants to make an issue out of this, they can contrast this heartfelt testimony with Bush's activities at that time: Vigorously not even bothering to show up for a flight physical, which disqualified him from flying, made him ineligible for deployment, and conveniently allowed him to sit out service.

I don't expect to hear anything from Bush about Viet Nam. He'll let the party hacks do the talking.

With any luck I'll have the time to write a long post on the subject. When it comes to running a civil society, much of it boils down to how we handle taxes. We'd all pretty much agree that some level of taxation is necessary...and we'd all agree that paying less is a good thing, and having government do less is a good thing.

I've been studying taxation and incomes. There are some pretty astonishing facts that you rapidly become aware of:

- three quarters of American families pay more in social security taxes than they do in income tax
- the total tax paid must be taken into account (income, medicaid/medicare, social security), and that's federal stuff
- inflation-adjusted income since 1970 has risen only 4% for the bottom 99%
- inflation-adjusted income since 1970 for the bottom 80% of earners has actually fallen slightly
- inflation-adjusted income since 1970 for the top 0.01% of earners has risen by over 400%
- tax burdens as a percentage of income are roughly equal, at all income levels; the rich do NOT pay more taxes as a percentage of income
- tax cuts for the rich are financed with social security revenues, which are exclusively collected from the poor and middle class
- repeals of inheritance tax were pitched as "save the farm"; there has not been one documented instance in the last 20 years of a farm being lost due to the inheritance tax.
- AMT is going to be a huge problem in a few years, because its formulas are not adjusted for inflation. AMT works by denying deductions; you cannot take a deduction for having a child, for example. The basic AMT deductions haven't increased; as such dramatically more people are subject to it. Bush could have used tax cuts to free middle class families from AMT, but he didn't...

Until you're in the top 1% of earners in the country, you haven't seen any real income increase in 1970 dollars.

How do the rising deficit, deficits as a percentage of GDP, and revenue projections all factor into this? Very badly, of course.

But not if you're at the very top...everything is fabulous. You've gotten the best tax legislation money can buy...

Bruce Schneier is a very well-respect cryptographer and writer on security policy in general. He's got a short essay here on security trade-offs which is well worth reading. I've read his book on the subject as well.

The point is, we can give new powers to our federal agencies with ease...but what are we really getting in return? We need to look very closely at freedoms that are lost, and at the potential for abuse that we introduce into the system.

For each of these powers, we need to look at the checks and balances. If someone goes "bad", what kind of abuse can this new power generate? If history teaches us anything, it's that the answer cannot be that we simply must trust those in positions of authority. The whole structure of government in this country is designed to eliminate single points of failure.

Bill Clinton spoke in Qatar recently; I think you'll find the speech well worth reading. What he says resonates with me.

Bush will support a constitutional amendment, designed to permanently enshrine discrimination against gay people into the constitution. Why? It's classic "look over there, not over here" politics. It's disgusting.

If there's ever been a time where state's rights are important, this is it.

Polling consistently shows that younger people have much more tolerance for gay people. In fact, even among young and relatively religious people, there's a who-cares attitude towards gay marriage. Why is this? It's simple.

News for you old people who are screwing up our country: There aren't that many gay people. We'd prefer to just live them alone.

Who gets to live with your stupid constitutional amendment? We do. And our children. You don't have relevance for much longer. Why the hell are you pushing your prejudices on the next generation?

The list of bullshit the greediest generation is forcing on everyone else just gets longer and longer.

Mike Hawash has indicated his regret for his actions in the past. He's received a seven year sentence, and I guess that seems about right. For those who don't remember, Hawash is the former Intel software engineer who was arrested a year or so ago for attempting to fight against US troops in Afghanistan. At the time, the tech community was somewhat up in arms because he'd been arrested without charge or explanation.

Some time passed, and then the FBI documents were made public. Reading them was pretty sobering. He hadn't just been arrested in a general sweep; there was very specific information about what he'd done wrong, how he'd gone about it, and so forth.

I think some of my incredulity at the time of his initial arrest was really due to the fact that he was a software guy. I just found it hard to believe that someone in my profession could do something so stupid. Clearly, though, he did.

Overlapping with that was the knowledge that various government agencies had engaged in a fair amount of abuse of process and flat out racism in detaining many other Arab citizens. I think this is one of the reasons that I feel so strongly about ensuring that individual rights are very carefully monitored and never abused...because when the government really needs to act in an extraordinary way, and be somewhat rough on a particular individual, we can't have any confusion about whether that person is being caught up in a general crackdown.

The FBI couldn't have done anything different in the Hawash case; they appear to have done everything by the book.

It's still strange to me, though. A guy who co-writes a book on DirectX programming, is a highly paid engineer, and is by all accounts a model suburban father, somehow morphs into a guy who's willing to fly to a strange country, pick up a gun, and shoot at US soldiers.

I take heart in the fact that there are tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of Muslim suburban fathers here who do not make the same choice, when torn between cultures. We stand with them; they are part of the American soul.

I feel sad for Mike Hawash and his family. He's paying a terrible and just price for his actions.

I note with a little sadness that Uru Live is disappearing, before it was even born. The Myst series of games have always represented the high-water mark for graphics and visual adventure games. Uru Live was an interesting effort...an attempt to bring this kind of game into the online massive multiplayer online space.

The company spent a ton of money to build this thing. The results, visually, were pretty astonishing. Great conceptual art, excellent engine...a lot of good ingredients were there. The best moments in Uru were "vista moments", where you would come across some new area, and be simply blown away by the beauty or concept of the thing.

So what went wrong? More than anything, I think, the problem was the underlying thinking about the game that was being played. Why do we play games, or read books, or watch movies? To see things that are beautiful; to see "new" things. We can do it to learn, to interact...or to compete.

Uru never had any sense of competition. One could be built, but it did not yet exist. In fact, Uru didn't really seem to have much of a sense of gaming at all. Clever puzzles that required cooperation could have been designed, and weren't. That really left only exploration. Uru Live itself never delivered that, either...the official version never came to be.

It strikes me that the marketing of this thing was screwed up pretty badly...to get the "buzz" you need to get an MMORPG started, you need a good burst of players. The single player game was fine, but it followed the general sales pattern of every single player game: Big initial sales, then a steady decline. MMORPGs are all about maintaining the franchise. You have this initial burst of players, and you need to retain them.

Uru Live didn't exist, so there was nothing to keep player mind share.

What's more, it was painfully clear in the live "prologue" that whatever plans there were for the online component simply hadn't worked out. If Live was somewhere near a true release, vastly more of the game should have been working during the Christmas timeframe. It might not have been ready, but it should have been dramatically apparent where it was all going. It was not.

I'd conclude that management realized that the Live part just wasn't going to work, for many reasons. They decided to milk the cash they could out of the single player version, and so they have. This is a sensible thing to do. There seems to be a lot of content that's been prepared for Live; this will be released as expansion packs for the original game. Again, this makes financial sense. For purchasers of the game it makes sense too -- and is probably less expensive than a monthly fee in any case.

Bold experiments happen, and sometimes they don't work. I hope the team is proud of their successes. They've really raised the bar in some areas. Deeper planning in the actual social/online game component might have given the project legs.

I could list out the specific policy tests I'm referencing and not go down the "incompetent" route. I guess I should do that; it's only fair that I do that. Conclusions need to be held.

But:

1. You are giving the politicians credit for winning a war. The military did that; the politicians don't do anything more than point the direction. This is a wash. We don't judge on the success of the war. We judge on the underlying reasoning.

2. You characterize the economy as "improving". Well, for who?

http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_snapshots

Apparently not for anybody who isn't a major-league investor. The scariest thing about the chart is that is does NOT reflect the jobs that were lost DURING the recession...so we are way behind where we were.

Why is this recession not generating any jobs or increases in wages for average americans? That is the big question.

The GOP answer is: Just wait -- you'll see. It'll work.

I think we just handed a huge chunk of social security money to the investment class in this country so we could create jobs for regular people. They took the money, and there's nothing to show for it. What is the time frame on tax stimulus, anyway? We certainly can't go by the estimates given by the GOP on when we'd see jobs created. _Every_ one of those estimates has turned out to be pie in the sky. Every Bush budget, for that matter, has been pie in the sky.

Given the failure (or at a minimum, dramatic underperformance) of the supply-side tax approach, what is an appropriate response?

I read somewhere today that the very richest amongst us have more or less convinced themselves that tax cuts for the wealthy really are the best way to gernerate growth.

How should we test whether or not this is true?

I'll write a little more in the next day or two, describing specific points of evaluation. I find this process interesting; I wrote a while back on the "Concerned Citizens Primer". It's time for Buckethead to make his case, and me to make mine.

I must confess that I don't like 9/11 being used as a catch-all excuse for every mis-step.

The little parenthetical that followed "can't read" was intended to alter the meaning of that, to "doesn't read anything that's given to him". Of course Bush can read; you can't barely graduate from Yale without being able to read something. Unless it's a complicated something.

I get to be much more ridiculous in comment threads, don't I?

Methinks Steve doth protest too much.

Ask yourselves this: Bush is blaming the CIA for feeding him bad information about Iraq. He's also saying that those intelligence reports have been around for a long time, and they've stayed consistent. Fine -- let's assume that's true. Why, then, has Bush's response been so different to the same intelligence reports? Clinton, viewing, the exact same information, chooses to remain at arm's length from Iraq. Bush sets off to war. Bush has 9/11 looming large...but that's what Afghanistan was about.

Bush gets his information from an inner circle of advisors. He doesn't read the reports directly; he doesn't know what they say. It's highly probably that there was quite a bit of spin put on the information Bush got. The simplest explanation for the whole situation is that some of his closest advisors _didn't_ see justification in the intelligence reports, but were willing to bet that when we got there, we'd find the evidence.

The bet didn't pay off. Bush was betrayed by his advisors; they made a decision that's supposed to be made by a President, in full view of the facts. They made the decision because they screwed around with the facts they presented Bush.

Similarly, on the economy, Bush has been screwed by his advisors again. Three budget years in a row they've predicated rosiness, as far as the rosy eye could see. None of it has come to pass.

While economists agree that there is _some_ stimulus provided by tax cuts, the real question is, how much? On that question, there is massive disagreement. The vast majority of economists don't think there's all that much, and judging by the state of the economy, they're right.

The Bushies predicted invading Iraq would cost around $50 Billion, back before it happened. Looks like it's going to be north of $200 Billion at this point, when all is said and done. This leaves you with two choices. Either they are completely freakin' incompetent at estimates, or they were deliberately lowballing their estimate (otherwise known as telling lies to get what you want).

Bush's casual destruction of the finances of the federal government is truly the greatest security threat facing this country. It turns out that the $200 Billion is doing this war on the cheap; there are serious problems with supplies. In other words, it's gonna cost more in the future. The American government needs to be in a fiscal position to finance necessary actions around the world. Bush is screwing that up, massively. Of course, we could just print more money, right? That'll fix it.

Here's the biggest mistake you make. You presume that the tax cuts mean that people have "money in their pockets". That's just plain wrong. The tax cuts didn't go to you and me, my friend. They didn't go to the regular people in this country. The vast majority of those dollars went back into the pockets of people who don't need them. People who are already vigorously trying to get around the tax code, to avoid paying _any_ share, let alone a fair share. People who have armies of lawyers devoted to keeping everything they can.

Let's stop talking about taxpayers as if we're all in the same class, the same boat. We aren't. I won't say much more this point, except the following: When you look at the IRS statistics that show the rise in average constant dollars income over the past twenty years, they are highly deceptive. They're deceptive because they show the average, not the median. Everyone who knows anything about math knows that the very first thing you do when you want to lie with statistics or hide something is use averages instead of means. I won't say the IRS is deliberately doing this; they're not. Bush, on the other hand, has happily pushed "averages" at the American public, who presume that they can rely on it as a guide.

Every action Bush has taken has been rooted in one of the following: Making his rich buddies vastly richer with tax cuts, engaging in experimentation with neoconservative foreign policy, pandering to the (relatively) conservative base with wedge issues, and selling access to the donor class. Virtually every domestic policy initiative he has engaged in has been a failure.

Environment: Terrible. Disagrees with conclusions on global warming, climate change, and so forth. His response? Cut the funding for research. Chewed up and spit out Christie Todd Whitman, who went into the job as EPA administrator thinking that she'd have some impact on policy. All decisions were made before Bush even took office. Maybe God'll sort us all out in the Rapture.

Economy: Terrible. Has attempted "stimulation" with tax cuts. Negligible effects on the economy, and massive destruction to the federal budget. The long term prospects for the federal government are so bad, it will inhibit the us economy, particularly by scaring off foreign investors, who prop up the government's borrowing habits.

Foreign Policy: A necessary war in Afghanistan, and a stupid, wasteful one in Iraq. The entire world holds Bush (and to an extent America), in very low esteem at the moment. Nobody was fooled by the pre-war WMD crap, and it turns out that there was good reason not to be fooled. His current attempts to run away from the considered opinions of his own administration is embarrassing for the country.

Political Climate: More partisan and divisive and STUPID than it has ever been. The reason? This white house is not interested in discussions. The "smart guys" have already made the decisions. Having international embarrassments like Tom Delay in power doesn't help, either.

Most GOP attacks on the Democrats this fall will center on their "hate" for Bush. Whatever...it's not exactly misplaced, to the extent that it exists. The GOP will tell its base that Democrats therefore hate them, as well. The dirty secret is that there are Republicans out there who are honorable, who are fiscally conservative, and who adhere to principle. The crooks in the white house won't have anything to do with those guys.

I guess I'll just keep trying. More comments have shown up on Winds of Change; the thread's disappeared into the past, so I think I'll just respond here.

Paul Stinchfield:

You say the phrase "elimination of the other" didn't come out of a book, but "just came out that way." Well, I never said it came out of a book. After all, leftists not only write that way, they also talk that way, and that particular rhetorical trope has been around long enough to thoroughly pervade the discourse of the left from professors of "cultural studies" to, I suppose, people who just like "Rage Against the Machine." And that phrase means genocide. Genocide motivated by racism, intolerance, bigotry and paranoia. That's what it means now, and that's what it meant when it was coined. However you picked it up, you surely knew its meaning and nonetheless used it to mischaracterize Trent's opinions. You cannot use such language and then credibly claim lack of responsibility for such libel. I gave you an opportunity to apologize and repudiate your inexcusable language, but you instead chose to weasel out.

Whatever. I'm 36 years old. I've spent pretty much every one of my adult years either building software companies or reading technical material that supported the building of software companies. Recently I've taken an interest in politics, and I take roughly the same approach. Unlike you, I have not had time to take classes, go to marches, attend seminars, subscribe to journals, and correspond. So when I tell you I haven't heard the phrase before, believe it. When I tell you I just wrote it that way, believe it. If you want to continue to make things up and accuse me of them, be my guest.

If I intend to say that Trent is pro-genocide, I'll just say it, exactly like that.

I simply observe the following: People will generally tell each other what they all want to hear. You see it on the left, and you see it on the right. The comfort level at Winds of Change is pretty high for hardliners on the right. You get to say what you like, there's plenty of comfortable agreement to go around. Sorry for disrupting the mutual back-slapping.

Trent writes:

Why should *ANYONE* take you seriously?

From the top:

1) Chemicals are not a threat to prepared troops in the field or emergency responders in hazmat moon suits. Unprepared civilians and emergency first responders are as vulnerable as the Kurds were to Saddam's genocidal gas attacks.

There have been a number of terrorist attack plans broken up in Europe that involved Muslim terrorist using lethal chemicals in enclosed spaces like the European parliment.

2) Libya's "turning states evidence" -- after we caught them red handed with the goods -- showed we have a world wide illict nuclear weapons component bazaar. One that would never have come to light without both 9/11/2001 and the war in Iraq.

3) As for biological weapons being "theoretical," tell that to Washington D.C. postal workers and the mail staffers at the networks and Senator Daschle's office.

Or in the first case, the relatives of dead postal workers.

The anthrax that hit Daschle's office was the product of an industrial weapons laboritory, not some "lone gunman" mad scientist. However much the FBI chants that to a gullible press corps.

4) David Kay was on today's Fox News Sunday speaking today of the breakdown of Iraq's internal order, via corruption, that was turning it into a "WMD market phenomina" where buyers and sellers were meeting. That exact thing is my leading theory for the fall 2001 anthrax mailing attack. What we are seeing of the Pakistani connection to Libya's nukes may already be just that.

5) It does not matter what you believe about the Israeli-Palestinian situation. What matters is the Palestinians won't settle for less than a total victory which involves genocide of the male Jews of Israel and Dhimminitude for the women and children survivors.

That you are chanting about a "reasonably honorable solution" doesn't adress the facts on the ground. It shows you are operating from religious conviction and not reality.

The Palestinians have chosen evil of their own free will. Deal with it or be damned for it.

I thought we were talking about a survival war here. I am trying to qualify this clash of civilizations as a survival war.

1. Yes, it sucks to be on the receiving end of a chemical attack. Barring the secret construction of a massive Islamic air force, exactly how are these chemicals going to be delivered to US cities in quantities that justify the term survival war? Ground-based delivery won't do much; the stuff dissippates too quickly. Ricin attacks don't qualify for survival warfare.

2. You don't actually believe that only religious nutcases are trying to get access to nuclear materials, do you? Criminal elements will want them, as will purely political movements. There are quite a few states who want them as well. In other words, eliminating the threat from Islam doesn't begin to cover the bad guys. That means your definition of bad guys has to expand, and it has to include words like "criminals".

3. When I say theoretical, I mean this in the scientific sense: Accepted theory is that they are very dangerous, and I agree. I do not mean this in the sense that the dangers are not real. The anthrax letters are a ludicrous point on which to suspend the notion of a necessary clash between cultures that could kill millions. I feel bad that a nut job with lab access (or maybe a rogue operative somewhere) got access to some of this stuff. He killed several people, none of whom were his intended target. Meanwhile, four thousand people that month died in car accidents. Hundreds were killed in criminal acts all across the country. The anthrax letters were clearly a failure, succeeding only to the extent they were referred to as a true threat.

4. Basic science is what it is, and Iraq is not the only rogue state in the world. There is a great deal of nuclear expertise all around the world. What, exactly, was being bought and sold? Knowledge is a slippery thing; there was nothing special about Iraq in that regard. I expect that similar knowledge sales have been occurring around the world. For all the characterization as a "marketplace", it must have been a marketplace without any physical presence. Weapons were not being manufactured in Iraq and sold around the world.

5. It's nice that you think all Palestinians think this way. Let's say they do...my reaction is, so what. They can't achieve the goal, and sooner or later, they'll simply give up. Fix the economic circumstances and you'll watch support dry up for the Islamists very quickly. I do not believe that an insane variant of any religion can take complete hold when communications are relatively free. I am a rationalist; I believe that ultimately human beings will select that which leads to gain. Palestinian leaders have controlled too much of the agenda, and have maximized their own gain at the expense of the population, who have been forcefed propaganda for far too long.

If, on the other hand, all Palestinians do not think this way, we must support those who counter the radical threat. There are limits to this, of course -- if we are supporting a vanishingly small segment of the population, there's no point.

Signs are that Arafat's means of control (financial) are coming apart. Into this gap will come other leaders; Palestinian society will fracture. This is a good thing. With any luck we'll see the emergence of a counter-Islamic segment of the population. The problem with the Islamists is that they're organized and armed. Like a drug gang in Rio, they can terrorize the population to get their way. Of course I view all of radical Islam pretty much the same way; Palestine is not the only population subject to this cancer.

As far as religious conviction goes, I have none. I believe simply in an unknowable God, which makes all this religious fighting and horror seem completely ridiculous.

The Ministry is experiencing some technical difficulties at the moment. I seem to be the only person who can use the site at the moment. There is no chance that I will abuse this power. None, I tell myself. None.

Commenting on Winds of Change, I was unnecessarily opaque with the "argues inductively" statement. I wrote:

Telenko argues inductively for the elimination of the other, where the permissible degree of otherness is inversely proportional to the capability of weapons.

Let me supply the underlying thinking. I'd like to note that I do not imply that Trent is directly arguing that we should commit genocide; this is why I use the term inductive.

An inductive proof is a weak form of mathematical proof. You prove a base case, then prove that it holds true for a successor to the base. You might then conclude that it holds true for _all_ cases (a bit more definition can be had at http://scom.hud.ac.uk/scomtlm/book/node125.html).

It is imperative that I note I am not well-read in military science. My co-blogger Buckethead is; with any luck he'll chime in at some point. I just work with the facts I have.

We are discussing the notion of a _survival_ war with Islamic radicals and their support network. There are two avenues by which danger can arrive on our shores: First, by the projection of conventional force. Second, by the use of weapons of mass destruction.

Conventional force is a conceivable survival threat, but only in the very long term. Radical islamic economies would have to develop to the point where they could compete with western economies, if conventional war is to be attempted. Certain tenets of radical islam make its competitiveness in this area highly unlikely (anti-woman, dictatorial, corrupt). It is possible that a huge _decline_ in western capabilities coupled with best-case rise in Islamic cultures might one day yield conventional military capabilities that could harm us, but I find it pretty unlikely.

WMD: Chemical won't do any significant damage. Nuclear is bad, but localized. Biological is the scariest, theoretically.

An isolated nuclear attack (a bomb in a city) is not a survival-level problem. If such an attack is committed the retribution will be terrible. The US will not allow a radical islamic state to achieve substantial missile capability; a MAD rerun is not likely to occur.

Biological weapons are quite terrifying. I really don't know what the state of the art is; I will simply assume that it's bad, and it's going to get a lot worse.

Trent believes (or I perceive him to believe) that deliberate action now is necessary to assure or increase the safety level of our culture. Both the urgency of that action and the severity of its effects are coupled to the nature of WMD -- because WMD can cause so much damage, there are certain forms of freedom of thought and action that we have greatly reduced tolerance for. I do not use the word "freedom" here in anything other than its strictest literal sense; freedom here is referring to activites that are more or less psychotic and evil.

The inductive part of this comes together as weapon power increases. The imminence and capability of the WMD threat to our culture increases over time. In order to maintain some perceived level of safety, we must engage tighter and tighter control over the freedoms of other cultures, and over individuals. As WMD technology improves, the resources required to marshal and deliver such an attack become within the capabilities of smaller and smaller groups.

Thus, the use of oppressive force to counter technology-driven WMD is, over the long run, likely to fail unless increasingly rigid control and suppression of opposition is executed.

Circling back around to the beginning, what this means is that using force to counter hate and prevent hate's access to WMD will require ever more effort and severity over time. We will place those resources efficiently, which means focusing on those cultures that are most different (least understandable, least trustworthy). The farthest extents of those target cultures will be eliminated over time; they will be evolved, via forceful methods to be closer to our own. Simultaneously, as reduction of the overt cultural enemy is performed, two things happen. First, the targets become progressive more difficult to identify (smaller clusters, too similar to "us"). Second, repressive forces will necessarily produce some level of backlash. These "internal" forces can become exceedingly dangerous.

At some point it gets hard to tell the difference between friend and foe.

I hope that's shed a little light on my thinking. It's not that I disagree, necessarily, with Trent's position that a hard pre-emptive strike can "teach a lesson". It can, and it will probably succeed on some levels. I remain more concerned over the long run with the evolution of technology.

I also remain convinced that a maximally successful, peaceful, and reasonably honorable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis will substantially reduce tensions and hatred in the Islamic world, thereby reducing danger to us. I hope I'm not wrong about this; otherwise, the problem is going to be very tough.

As far as the phrase "elimination of the other" goes, it didn't come from a book -- it just came out that way when I wrote that comment. I hope my use of the phrase is clearer, now.

On a related topic: If Israel were directly attacked by conventional military force today, wouldn't the US step in and defend her? I am quite sure we would, as would a good chunk of the rest of the world.

As far as I know, in the six day war, the US did _not_ intervene. US forces were repositioned to express neutrality. The Liberty incident may have clouded the situation. Why, during this engagement, was US support of Israel not a _given_?